SnowingXIV

Right? I can see the appeal of convenience by being able to purchase drinks at a pool bar or something so you don't need to carry ID/cards on you but at what cost? Payment by fingerprint (even though we do that through our phones currently) but at a physical device controlled by someone else feels dystopian.

The cynic in me is screaming that this site is simply a lawyer referral intake front. There are a number of websites that try to brand themselves as public service tool but it's basically attorney advertising except more clever.

That's their monetization. They don't have to sell advertising because the submissions are worth real money alone. I do a fair amount of work in the legal space and these deceptive tactics are really disappointing to see. I'd name some of the top offenders of this but I rather not give them anymore traffic and signals for google. If you're funded by lawyers or are a lawyer yourself please just say you are without the fog of a non-profit community driven platform.

If that's not the case with these sites (no way to really know what sort of handshake deals were made but I'd be surprised) I wish you the best of luck.

I'm liking the pricing with you guys, I have a list of contacts currently around 5k that will probably take awhile to grow to 10k that I wouldn't mind paying $10/m to send monthly emails to. Now again I want to send a warm "open" to them to update their subscription settings and whatnot but since many may be a little old (we rarely sent emails except direct correspondence) I'm super concerned about people hitting "mark as spam" and it becoming an abuse complaint resulting in domain blacklists. I did a 2k run on an actual newsletter with mailchimp and 4 people did that. About 19 unsub'd which is fine. Any advice?

Appreciate the detailed response, I was curious if they did it in house and seems like they don't and Salesforce is pretty prevalent.

Looking into sendgrid. It's not super important that they all make it there and if it takes a few hours that's not an issue either. Trying to do a monthly newsletter but to a large list that I have broken up between groups. My biggest fear even after doing a mailchimp campaign was being flagged for spam and that then the domain would have problems sending actual emails to business contacts, partners, clients, etc and working with blacklists. Even worse if the IP is flagged for issues.

Sendgrid pricing looks fair but mailchimp was super slick as far as platform goes. Maybe the route is to buy a new domain that's similar like a previous commenter suggested and sign up with this to blast the 200k. I actually have a domain name that is very similar I'm not not using and that domain redirects to the main site + all those emails get forwarded to the real emails (some people make the mistake of sending to it). It simply has another word at the end.

I was with you until you wanted to eliminate cash in favor of more coins. How is someone supposed to carry those in their wallet? Many use thin wallets or money clips for card/ID/cash. Plus if I'm leaving someone a tip, I'm sure they'd hate to have their pockets jingling while they serve food or valet. Cash is also a lot easier to count, flip through, harder to lose.

This is hitting it on the head. A lot of clients don't want to provide their own content and spend time filling out headings and searching for images, sure some do but mostly they are focusing on their business and while yes they are the ones closest to the metal, actually doing the work, they aren't and likely shouldn't be doing the copywriting. Speak with them, figure out as much as you can about them, take notes, and get a copywriter like you said.

More often this goes pretty smoothly and they'll review the website quickly and will send corrections like "Oh, you should add this sentence." or "Don't say that, remove it." I usually do a few pieces and make sure the tone is on point and then take that new information to flesh out the rest of the site.

It's a lot easier for them to edit a "complete" product than to see a blank canvas and have to figure out what goes where.

I agree with this simplistic approach, naturally I'm sure like many of us did when we were learning start to ask the questions "I'm doing this over and over again which seems really redundant, not secure, prone to human errors, etc, there must be a better a way!" and at that time you can happily explain to him that for the majority of the stack there is usually a solution that someone has come up with that solves those pain points.

Please do a writeup on this! One of the reasons I've been dragging my feet on home ownership is I'm not a fan of lawn mowing. Now if only you could also automate shoveling/snowblowing.

Huh, I've been doing this for years without realizing it. I'm never hungry in the morning except for coffee (maybe that ruins this). To add more to discussion I also lift 4-5 times a week. Besides obvious physical benefits of muscle mass lifting improves life in many other ways. I notice if I ever skip or don't stick to my regular gym regimen I mentally feel unfit. Going to the gym actually increases energy and allows more productivity at work, social outings, etc.

Your comment has convinced me to do this. This is pretty fantastic. It was driving me nuts being signed into both work and personal gmails to access either my files or adwords. Not to mention YouTube which would open under the work account sometimes or drive. Plus now I can rip out all the work bookmarks and shove that into a work only profile.

My only concern now is with using multiple devices. Do I just sign into to both profiles on each device? I only worry because there was a big snafu that occurred with their password manager that synced nothing and everything disappeared. (I no longer trust google with that stuff).

Well, I think it highly depends on the niche. My wife for instance, enjoys makeup and skincare products so she follows certain personalities that sell their own lipstick or whatever. The most prominent examples of this that come to mind (because she brings it up to me) is Kylie Jenner and Jeffree Star. The products aren't prohibitively expensive (though I think they are incredibly overpriced and believe she'd do just fine by buying generic Target brand stuff) but she seems to be persuaded by it.

I know with those examples they are selling their own products, but I'm sure there are some more Linus Tech Tips style makeup influencers that she follows that impacts her buying decisions with her disposable income.

Same. I used to buy into this when I was so afraid of "breaking rules" but this is before I realized it was often just parroted advice from dated guidance. I've recently switched to using a lot more standard monochrome styles for websites and find them to be more accessible and clear.

There is also a reason some of the largest news pubs do it too.

https://www.nytimes.com #000 #333 https://www.washingtonpost.com #2a2a2a

I'd caution against this, because I've done it. I'm using a 2016 MacBook Pro for basically everything from design work to development. Getting fired up and setting up my workflow took no effort. I bought another laptop to run linux/windows and my god everything took so much longer to do. Most applications would require me to pull up some third party documentation to install. By the time that was done the task would have already been done on the MacBook. Now that laptop just sits and hosts a plex server or plays some games.

But that doesn't mean I wouldn't like things to get better because Apple is seriously dragging their feet. The touchbar is super annoying and really miss having actual buttons. It's beautiful hardware but would love more focus on figuring out the mess of port issues. Too many adapters!

Agreed. I picked up an interest in golf lately so I followed maybe 1-3 players and now that's all I see. Everything in my feed and the explore is golf. Which, granted could be worse and I don't hate it but now I feel like it's no longer a social app just a golf feed.

I gave it a try, it wasn't able to find anything related to the keywords I'm trying to track but this seems to be useful if it did hah.

This and icons8 is getting pretty close to what I'd love to use on a regular basis. Unsplash has been great for creating a wonderful platform for truly free do what you want images. Now I'd like to see the same in audio/video. For advertising on YouTube or even actual commercials it would be nice have really affordable solution to use generic (but good!) sounding music that small businesses could use to give their ads a more polished feel. It's a big help because a lot of companies can't afford the licenses for big tracks or hire in a studio. Heck, even paying for images typically is a hard pill to swallow.

As a consumer I always appreciate seeing higher quality production regardless of the product.

I’m still looking for a reader that can crawl the web and find articles based on specific keywords and exclude sites of my choice. I want to follow certain topics in a particular niche but the best solution is setting weekly roundup with google alerts in their news which only includes those that are part of “google news.”

This question is confusing. It sounds like you just want money without providing value. I would worry less about that part. Figure out something you can actually provide first without thinking about the free money, maybe a-lot x hours a month for providing additional digital assets (you made their logo but if they need it in different sizes, colors, svg, included with a picture, facebook banner, google business, some advertisement, etc) that might have value if they can't do that themselves or don't have the time. It's almost always the later.

I’ve learned that at the very least to ensure that everything is being properly backed up and that the restore works. Testing this regularly puts my mind at ease that even if my site, application, whatever gets destroyed, stolen, etc I can bring it back to life in a very short time. It’s very difficult to ensure that something is 100% secure (not even sure if possible since the major players like Twitter make mistakes). Of course, this doesn’t solve the issue of data being taken but that’s why it’s important to understand the data you actually store and if you truly need to store it or if some could be handled another way.

I might be missing a lot of what you're saying, but say I worked for FAAMG - they just pay a lot more than what my neighbor could pay me. Even if repairing the neighbors deck or planting new trees in their yard or whatever might be "better" for society than submitting code for review on some feature. I guess I'm trying to understand what you're getting at because I think a lot of people don't believe Bezos or Koch are special, but they can simply pay them more.

I'm not but that sounds great!

While I somewhat agree, no one is forcing you to use this software and this holier than thou attitude is not constructive.

You're free to use gnus, notmuch, mu4e, whatever million other variants if you're so concerned about your "precious" resources. This electron app that's been built has some neat features that a lot of people might find useful, like that search seems pretty cool.

Great point, I don't think people think about this enough. When you are your own boss, start your own company, freelance, etc you have tons of bosses they just have another title. You have clients, shareholders, someone to be accountable to. Getting clients is not always easy. Sure you might be able to pick what clients you take on but if you only want the best you could have some pretty rough months. Even if you built a product, a simple saas type of deal and want that passive-ish income you need to make the users happy.

I have an an employer, but I could go do this work for many other companies and freelance/run my own show and potentially make a lot more. I would then have to hire a number of other people to do quite a few of the things that I don't do or do it myself and literally have 0 time plus figure out benefits and may not have consistent pay (at least not guaranteed). This is all assuming it also worked out! I'm enjoying using my skills and getting a fair agreed amount without having to deal with anything else really. Trade offs. No such thing as a free lunch.

Throwing in my 2c as I've worked at massive fortune 100 companies and took a shift to work for small businesses.

The top comment about you eat what you kill in small business is the mantra. It's frightening to think if you don't perform, the risk isn't about not getting a raise, it's the company going under/firings will happen, now you need a job, other very bad stuff. This pressure forces you to be efficient, slacking off isn't an option and would be quite visible. Shit wouldn't get done.

Working at the large companies this was never a fear, if you performed above average (even probably average) your job was likely safe. The cost to hire, train, get someone plugged into the ridiculous amount of systems, assigned hardware, you name it is very high. Benefits are generally better as well because economies of scale, neat discounted stock options, etc. This probably opens the door to less efficient day-to-day stuff taking place (sometimes).

It's not cut and dry though, but I'm glad to have experienced both and am always open to either. Startup culture right now is super appealing personally because the whole Jobs' "Be Hungry" thing, age, mobility, etc but I'd imagine once you have a family to take care priorities and risk analysis is recalibrated which is cool too. Please note that I'm not saying having a family or working at large corporation the worker is less efficient it just might have less ramifications because of the structure.

Same boat. It's just hard to ask for more money and less hours at the same time. I'm trying to argue give me a smaller increase at reducing a day to be able to focus on hobby projects or just mental health. Unsure if it'll happen but fingers crossed!

Very much so this. There was a strong request for a better solution for the company's database system and I finagled some off-the-shelf solutions but I knew it wasn't great and there was a lot of clunkiness. The users figured this was as good as it gets just had to deal. I wanted to change that.

The workflow was pretty unique and there wasn't much out there that could tackle it in the right manner with price constraints in mind. I set off to rebuild something from the ground-up but tailored exactly to what the users wanted (I kept track of all the complaints of previous solutions). Because this is specific to the company, I was able to make many of the routine tasks automated and reduce time users needed to spend with the tools. Now they actually enjoy when they do! There is no gimmicky extra stuff, it's just software that solves their day-to-day problems. The application I built is super boring, nothing groundbreaking or inventive, but it works.

Seeing it run smoothly in production and having people enjoy the UI/get to spend more time on other things has been quite gratifying.

This looks amazing and exactly what I want if I didn't suck with vim.

Believe me, I wish I spent more time getting familiar with vim to enjoy that workflow. The bottleneck in programming something is very rarely my typing speed though.

Spotify has also made me completely abandoned any type of local music library (it even offers to save for offline use which I do often for road trips or flights). I do buy vinyl and spend money there but can't imagine ever going back to any other structure besides paying a streaming service for digital music. It's been great not having to constantly configure foobar or figure out syncing between devices.

My gripe was always having a terminal not blend in with the editor which makes this nice but vscode essentially does that out of the box for me. Now if I ever need the terminal and I'm not looking to code anything, I just use the native terminal. I can see why some people might like this if they are using sublime, atom, etc other editors that don't have terminal included but that was the only void this somewhat filed. (And yes, you can edit up the native terminal but you still get a different looking top bar).